The advent of the Internet has opened the door to a new channel of advertising. For example, a web page can display a banner advertisement at the top of the web page. Moreover, the subject matter of Internet-based advertisements can be changed on a dynamic basis. In this way, a web service can promote a series of different products and services through its web site. One problem facing the art of Internet advertising, however, is the targeting of advertisements so that they are relevant to the audience.
Several different mechanisms have been devised for identifying characteristics of a particular audience. For example, when a user selects a well known sports web site, web services can use this information to direct sports related advertisements to the user. Additionally, when a user conducts a search using a web service such as Excite, Yahoo, or Lycos, the search terms may be used to select a category of advertisements or indeed directly determine the advertisement itself. In one example, when a user enters search terms using a web service, an Amazon.com advertisement appears in the web page associated with the web service inviting the user to search Amazon.com for products related to the search term.
Just as the success of the Internet has made it more difficult for advertisers to characterize and efficiently communicate with their audience, the success of the Internet has also presented problems to Internet users. The success of the Internet has led to a vast array of web services, each catering to a particular audience. The average user simply does not have the resources and time to discover each of these web services. Furthermore, new web services appear on a daily basis while other web services disappear, making it even more difficult to determine which web services are best for a particular need. To address the difficulty of identifying the appropriate web service for a particular search query, a variety of metasearch engines have been developed. While the algorithms used by such search engines are functional, they are unsatisfactory in practice. Much of the unsatisfactory performance of metasearch engines results from the rigid method used by metasearch engines to identify candidate web services.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for identifying web services that are most likely to produce useful information for a given set of search terms. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a means for identifying content that is most likely to be of interest to a user. Such content includes advertisements that closely match a user's particular interests.